• Question: What happens to animals that get oil on their bodies in the sea?

    Asked by tigger2 to Alex, Jools, Lynz, Matt, Rika on 13 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Matthew Dickinson

      Matthew Dickinson answered on 10 Jun 2011:

      Well it’s a really sad thing to see when a animal is swimming and then gets oil on it. However there is hope, the reason that you see people on TV catching the animals is to take them to a point where they can clean them. Normally what happens is the animal is first rubbed down with a paper towel what this hopefully does, is soak the excess oil from the animal into the paper. From here the animal is then placed into a warm water with strong soap (fairy liquid) in it, the idea is that the soap will assist in thinning the oil so it is easier to remove from the feather or fur. Then from there the animal is cleaned, if the water goes cold and the animal is not cleaned the process starts again. However the sad thing about this is animals can often become unwell where they will need to go into care where they can be looked after and hopefully they can recover.

    • Photo: Lyndsey Fox

      Lyndsey Fox answered on 11 Jun 2011:

      Unfortunately the oil renders an animal’s fur or a bird’s feathers useless when it comes to insulation from the cold and elements, and if the animal swallows any of the oil it can cause ulcers and bleeding in the stomach and intestines.

      But as Matt has already said, there are usually plenty of people prepared to help wash it off.

      I’m not an expert in this area, but if you’d like to learn more the australian government has a really exellent website about it:

      http://www.amsa.gov.au/marine_environment_protection/educational_resources_and_information/teachers/the_effects_of_oil_on_wildlife.asp

    • Photo: Chandrika Nair

      Chandrika Nair answered on 12 Jun 2011:

      Oil spills are really awful events that can lead to the destruction of life in several ways. To answer your question directly, at one extreme animals covered in a film of oil can literally die from suffocation (they can’t breathe). This affects sea turtles in particular. Secondly, the oil coating can also weigh animals down, so sea birds can’t fly away. Moreover, as Lynz explained, oil also strips of the waterproof and heat-insulation properties of bird feathers, so a third effect is that these birds may die from the cold (hypothermia).

      Less direct effects are the following : 1) The oil coating of sea birds is often transferred to the eggs they lay, which leads to suffocation of the embryos. 2) Animals covered in oil that try to clean themselves will ingest (swallow) the oil but won’t be able to digest it, leading to poisoning. 3) Oil that hasn’t been digested also gets passed on to anything that eats the animal that ingested the oil so the toxic properties of ingested oil tend to accumulate up food chains (potentially even reaching us humans). These toxins can cause poisoning, cancer, ulcers and other diseases.

      On a brighter note, alongside human efforts to clean up oil spills, one of our powerful allies are naturally occuring bacteria. Because bacteria are so diverse and can adapt very rapidly to new environments, for any oil spill situation there are actually bacteria already present that will be able to start degrading the oil into less toxic substances (they use to oil as a food source themselves). This has been the case in the recent BP oil spill: http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-20014667-54.html

    • Photo: Alex Davenport

      Alex Davenport answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      You know, I don’t think I have ever thought about this!
      I have also learned what happens to animals in oil spills. I assumed they would use some form of detergent to help break the oil down but other than that I didn’t know.
      I’m glad the others are so well educated on this.
      🙂

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